outlawpoet

Karma: 125

outlawpoet Apr 26, 2009, 8:57 PM
1 point
in reply to: PhilGoetz’s comment on: Where’s Your Sense of Mystery?
Gene transfer also resolves some very puzzling and ugly irregularities. Sometimes the beauty isn’t just the theory, but it’s relationship to data. If a theory’s very elegant, but the data too messy, it disturbs my sense of completion.

outlawpoet Apr 26, 2009, 1:38 AM
0 points
in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: Where’s Your Sense of Mystery?
I’m not sure that’s true. Lots of people would want to know how to make the improved solar technology, because it would be immensely commercially valuable.

Also, I tend to think people’s beliefs about technology, science, and the way to solve problems would change, given a large change in energy infrastructure.

People use pervasive technology or social structures as a metaphor for many things, especially new ideas. Witness how early 20th century theorists use mechanical and hydraulic metaphors in their theories of the body and brain, whereas late 20th century biologists use network, electrical, and systems metaphors that simply didn’t exist before.

outlawpoet Apr 26, 2009, 1:20 AM
2 points
on: Where’s Your Sense of Mystery?
As a total sidenote, your choice of examples is bad. If someone solved photosynthesis in a way that output useful engineerable technologies, it would change your life, and the lives of almost everybody else.

Solar power cheap and powerful enough to run most of our technology would be a massive sea change.

outlawpoet Apr 25, 2009, 3:34 AM
1 point
in reply to: hirvinen’s comment on: Rational Groups Kick Ass
I agree. Mensa and the AMA aren’t actually avowedly rational, nor do they have any group goals that require the same, but they are weakly rational groups, because they contain a lot of smart people and they have institutional biases against failures of intelligence and opinion.

This keeps out certain types of dysrationalia, which is all I needed for my comparison to more vulnerable groups like the LDS and those Charismatic Protestants.

outlawpoet Apr 25, 2009, 3:17 AM
2 points
in reply to: Jack’s comment on: What’s in a name? That which we call a rationalist…
The best argument against it is that it isn’t really a unique descriptor such that it can be falsified usefully.

Most posts and comments on LessWrong would work just as well if the authors were frequentist statisticians, old fashioned logical positivists, or even people who couldn’t really do the math. The epistemic viewpoint doesn’t actually hang off of a uniquely Bayesian procedure.

outlawpoet Apr 25, 2009, 3:00 AM
6 points
in reply to: Tiiba’s comment on: What’s in a name? That which we call a rationalist…
Utilitarianism is an ethical theory, put forth by John Stuart Mill. It’s distinct from confusingly similar technical terms like expected utility, and is definitely not a unanimous ethical position around here.

outlawpoet Apr 25, 2009, 2:54 AM
4 points
on: Rational Groups Kick Ass
A point further in favor, dysrationalia accumulates in groups much as the small advantages you describe do.

Mensa and AMA members may not have superpowers(to pick two weakly rationalist groups), but they also don’t spend millions of dollars sponsoring attempts to locate Noah’s Ark, or traces of the Jewish tribe that the LDS church believes existed in South America.

outlawpoet Apr 25, 2009, 2:43 AM
0 points
in reply to: outlawpoet’s comment on: What’s in a name? That which we call a rationalist…
Oh, um, in case it wasn’t clear, I think everybody would have their own array of negative and positive descriptors. I don’t think we’re that similar.

outlawpoet Apr 25, 2009, 2:34 AM
3 points
on: What’s in a name? That which we call a rationalist…
I think the ‘identity’ we’re ascribing to the nascent community here is more complicated than any existing labels. Maybe we could build one, but I don’t think there is one now.

I generally label myself contextually, in response to kinds of evaluation being made in the conversation or missive:

When I’m trying to emphasize my commitment to quantifiable, established knowledge or highlight my rejection of a concept of school of thought I feel falls outside that, I call myself a Scientist.

When the discussion centers on reflective beliefs, conceptual methodology, or worldviews, I call myself a Rationalist.

During discussions about effectiveness, organization, and the feasibility of actions, when I want to highlight my tendency to evaluate ends and means for costs and details, I call myself an Engineer.

To highlight my consequentialist evaluation of actions in ethical and moral judgements, I call myself a Pragmatist.

Discussions get too abstract or ungrounded, without units or direct examples, so to get back to more useful areas I call myself a Realist.

Often I find myself in discussions with multiple persons, whose rhetoric seems to have retreated into armed camps, so to coax them to engage in constructive exchange and give myself an opportunity to get a look at their best data as opposed to their best arguments, I describe myself as Willing to Be Persuaded.

outlawpoet Apr 21, 2009, 10:12 PM
5 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: The Sin of Underconfidence
er, am I misparsing this?

It seems to me that if you haven’t hit the ground while skydiving, you’re some sort of magician, or you landed on an artificial structure and then never got off..

outlawpoet Apr 18, 2009, 2:45 AM
3 points
on: Rationality Quotes—April 2009
In a manner which matches the fortuity, if not the consequence, of Archimedes’ bath and Newton’s apple, the [3.6 million year old] fossil footprints were eventually noticed one evening in September 1976 by the paleontologist Andrew Hill, who fell while avoiding a ball of elephant dung hurled at him by the ecologist David Western.

~John Reader, Missing Links: The Hunt for Earliest Man

outlawpoet Apr 18, 2009, 12:20 AM
4 points
in reply to: steven0461’s comment on: Two-Tier Rationalism
I have attempted explicit EU calculations in the past, and have had to make very troubling assumptions and unit approximations, which has limited my further experimentation.

I would be very interested in seeing concrete examples and calculation rules in plausible situations.

outlawpoet Apr 17, 2009, 11:50 PM
3 points
in reply to: Lawliet’s comment on: My main problem with utilitarianism
It depends on what you mean by wrecking. Morphine, for example, is pretty safe. You can take it in useful, increasing amounts for a long time. You just can’t ever stop using it after a certain point, or your brain will collapse on itself.

This might be a consequence of the bluntness of our chemical instruments, but I don’t think so. We now have much more complicated drugs that blunt and control physical withdrawal and dependence, like Subutex and so forth, but the recidivism and addiction numbers are still bad. Directly messing with your reward mechanisms just doesn’t leave you a functioning brain afterward, and I doubt wireheading of any sophistication will either.

outlawpoet Apr 17, 2009, 11:15 PM
1 point
in reply to: AllanCrossman’s comment on: My main problem with utilitarianism
Well, that’s an interesting question. If you wanted to just feel maximum happiness in a something like your own mind, you could take the strongest dopamine and norepinephrin reuptake inhibitors you could find.

If you didn’t care about your current state, you could get creative, opioids to get everything else out of the way, psychostimulants, deliriants. I would need to think about it, I don’t think anyone has ever really worked out all the interactions. It would be easy to achieve a extremely high bliss, but some interactions work would be required to figure out something like a theoretical maximum.

The primary thing in the way is the fact that even if you could find a way to prevent physical dependency, the subject would be hopelessly psychologically addicted, unable to function afterwards. You’d need to stably keep them there for the rest of their life expectancy, you couldn’t expect them to take any actions or move in and out of it.

Depending on the implementation, I would expect wireheading to be much the same. Low levels of stimulation could potentially be controlled, but using to get maximum pleasure would permanently destroy the person. Our architecture isn’t built for it.

outlawpoet Apr 17, 2009, 10:22 PM
−2 points
in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: My main problem with utilitarianism
It’s fairly straightforward to max out your subjective happiness with drugs today, why wait?

outlawpoet Apr 16, 2009, 9:26 PM
4 points
on: Welcome to Less Wrong!
- Handle: outlawpoet
- Name: Justin Corwin
- Location: Playa del Rey California
- Age: 27
- Gender: Male
- Education: autodidact
- Job: researcher/developer for Adaptive AI, internal title: AI Psychologist
- aggregator for web stuff
Working in AI, cognitive science and decision theory are of professional interest to me. This community is interesting to me mostly out of bafflement. It’s not clear to me exactly what the Point of it is.

I can understand the desire for a place to talk about such things, and a gathering point for folks with similar opinions about them, but the directionality implied in the effort taken to make Less Wrong what it is escapes me. Social mechanisms like karma help weed out socially miscued or incompatible communications, they aren’t well suited for settling questions of fact. The culture may be fact-based, but this certainly isn’t an academic or scientific community, it’s mechanisms have nothing to do with data management, experiment, or documentation.

The community isn’t going to make any money(unless it changes) and is unlikely to do more than give budding rationalists social feedback(mostly from other budding rationalists). It potentially is a distribution mechanism for rationalist essays from pre-existing experts, but Overcoming Bias is already that.

It’s interesting content, no doubt. But that just makes me more curious about goals. The founders and participants in LessWrong don’t strike me as likely to have invested so much time and effort, so much specific time and effort getting it to be the way it is, unless there were some long-term payoff. I suppose I’m following along at this point, hoping to figure that out.

outlawpoet Apr 8, 2009, 7:28 PM
1 point
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Mandatory Secret Identities
Not something I was aware of, but good to know.

I wasn’t aware of anything from before his career as an academic, 1982-onward. His wikipedia article doesn’t mention anything but the atom thing. But he certainly set out to be a Professor of rationality-topics.

outlawpoet Apr 8, 2009, 7:13 PM
0 points
in reply to: Nominull’s comment on: Mandatory Secret Identities
I agree with this comment vociferously.

The upper bound isn’t a terrible idea, but it would, for example, knock E.T. Jaynes out of the running as a desirable rationality instructor, as the only unrelated competent activity I can find for him is the Jaynes-Cumming Model of atomic evolution, which I have absolutely zero knowledge of.

outlawpoet Apr 8, 2009, 7:04 PM
0 points
in reply to: MBlume’s comment on: Where are we?
Playa del Rey, by the beach just south of Santa Monica and West of LA proper.

outlawpoet Apr 8, 2009, 1:38 AM
2 points
in reply to: taw’s comment on: What do fellow rationalists think about Mensa?
One of my previous co-workers ran a San Diego chapter. He enjoyed it a great deal, but that may have been because he was in charge, and shaping the meetings and context towards what he was interested in.

Lots and lots of fairly loose speculation on topics outside their specialties, lots of puzzles and mind-games. It wasn’t really very fun for me, although the gender ratio was better than I expected.